With a FOSS system the student or teacher simply does a dump of their setup (OS and all) and shares it with anyone they please. No proprietary system can allow this!

In the 3D arena we have efforts such as: http://metatek.blogspot.com/2010/03/opensim-mars-simulation.html

This package is generating a lot of excitement and is trivially shared and customized to individual needs.

@Breen I have the courage of my convictions to put down $L250 that says fat clients become nearly irrelevant in 5 years.

Here’s why:

1. As I tried to point out, creating high end graphics is more IO bound than compute bound. Consumer internet pipes are orders of magnitude too narrow to transmit the volume of data that you need to get much beyond the caricatured look of MMO avatars, static environments, and simplistic particle effects — no matter what kind of badass GPU you have on the client. It’s a credit to the MMO developers and content creators how they can get such rich looks with so little bandwidth.
2. The overwhelming success of laptops, and more mobile devices, and the drive for lower prices on these devices, is going to push the industry to optimize client graphics capabilities for streaming video, not 3D rendering.
3. On the other hand the pervasiveness of these devices combined with the growing acceptance of cloud based “flat” content are going to build a demand for and expectation of cloud based 3D graphics.

The two developments to watch for over the next year are:
1. How successful is “Onlive” (and other server side game ventures — Gaikai, OTOY, Playcast, etc.)? If it is a roaring success, there will be a flood of companies hanging on their coattails. If it fails badly, well, then I guess I won’t be doubling down on my $L250.
2. Public cloud based GPUs. There have been rumors for nearly a year about Amazon and/or Rackspace introducing cloud based GPU instances, and behind the scenes Nvidia and AMD are working on virtualizing GPUs. If, when, and what price these become available will all point to what kind of business cases can be made for all graphics applications, from film production to medical imaging. This would also potentially open the door for non-proprietary virtual world hosting.

I hate predicting the future because in a choice between outcome A and B, you invariably end up being blindsided with outcome C. But server side rendering has so much potential to open up virtual worlds — heavy particle effects, hundreds (or thousands) of avatars in a sim, ambient occlusion rendering, more realistic avatar to avatar interactions, sayonara to graphics system inconsistencies — that it would be foolish to write off. Even though there are clearly a lot of dots to connect to make it happen.

Although fat clients rule the day today, and I wouldn’t switch careers yet, neither would I spend time crafting code for them as if they would be part of the Linux kernel. At least that’s what my $L250 says.

Re server side rendering. Thats all well and good but someone will have to have ownership of the thousands of square meters of server farms stacked to the gunnels with hardware. And make a viable business case of it. So Fat Clients are the way. Otherwise it will be exactly as it is now, with a Linden Labs like company hosting, processing and streaming the client views. Ownership remains proprrietry.

Nay, Opensim, a hypergrid type communication system, linking to self hosted regions(probably a mega-region like system available today), and communicating back to a WebGL client with sufficient graphics card(as that person would have already to run there id Tech 4, Crysis or Unreal engined games.

But independently of where the rendering happens, interactive environments send fast streams of individual events from the clients back to the server (so, the opposite direction), and the server has to react to them. Those can’t be http; they’re not video either; they’re somewhere in between.

Therefore IMHO if you are projecting 2+ years down the road, you had better be considering server side rendering into your plans. It may just be the kind of paradigm shifting kick-in-the-pants that this field needs right now.